Calling anti-premine myriad of devs “maximalists” is incredibly insulting to all devs, including countless altcoin devs like me who would NEVER do anything terrible eth devs have done from design to implementation for ethical and technical reasons.
What ETH community seems to always forget is the USD value of coins, not just their on-chain count.
Here’s a trivial hypothetical scenario which is consistent with what we saw during the DAO confiscation that can be used but we can never be sure was used.
- Vitalik chooses to keep majority of premine in secret. So he buys from his own sale for free to keep 71m eth from unknown bitcoin accounts. Note that nobody else can stop this or detect it (without very obvious mistakes).
- Vitalik creates new alternative chain (hard fork) where he gets back money something else has through valid transactions. Let’s call one Vitalik-chain and one old-chain.
- Vitalik now has Vitalik-chain premine and old-chain premine. Vitalik signals he will not support old-chain and follows through by selling only the old-chain premine reducing dollar value of each old-chain coin.
- This means (a) the wealth of everyone who owns any old-chain coins will be crushed for unknowable period of time giving all old-chain holders incentive to sell and reduce any incentive to buy. This means supply can force reduction in users, developers, holders.
- The reward miners get in USD is reduced only on old-chain, meaning it can only pay for less total hash power, and makes hash power switch away, and making it more susceptible to 51% attacks. Note Ethereum Classic was 51% attacked successfully due to its lower value. This means further reduction in security and thus reduction in incentives for users, developers, holders.
- Vitalik places the fork as default setting in the most used client so anyone automatically updating switches. Anyone not switching will have to due to ice age anyway, forcing the apathetic majority on his side. Ethereum clients are fast sync by default (yet they count as full nodes) which do not even verify the hard coded state transition rules during sync.
Blockchains are controlled by incentives on every level. It’s the reason we need coins for decentralization and why coin-less blockchains are not secure. It’s silly to assume the very medium of incentives that prices incentives and economic majority for not matter for blockchains. It’s what keeps miners from censoring transactions in fear of the response of the market. Now if the market is almost entirely a single party, that party controls it. Ethereumfraud subreddit covers what happened in great detail.
They don’t even have to do it all every time, just signal the intent, which is enough for non-Vitaliks with millions on the line to have their incentives controlled by someone else. This is what it looks like:
And ethereum foundation was very public about selling the old-chain coins from telegram chats, twitter, being part of Robinhood Group as mentioned here and https://medium.com/@jackfru1t/the-robin-hood-group-and-etc-bdc6a0c111c3 and https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/ethereum-chain-of-liars-thieves-b04aaa0762cb#.66xdzc8nd .
Ethereum community are 100% bad actors, intended or not.
Miners do act in their self interest. Users act in their self interest. Because their interest is not going broke when the economic majority of a single permissioned central trusted party nobody can stop puts their self interest at risk.
And the arrogance and maliciousness of ethereum devs doing it all by default:
No idea what “dapp developers” have to do with it. Dapps are not possible on centralized platforms like Ethereum.
Transition to PoS makes the whole thing even worse than perfectly bad as it is now. PoS is always permissioned by current coin holders to choose to give up coins to participate in consensus or even use chain. There is no unforgeable costliness in PoS like in proof of work meaning people can hold on to control % FOREVER. Permissioned networks cannot be decentralized. In this case, majority of coins possible to hold depend entirely on trust in a single trusted party starting with permissioned act of premine and trusted backdoored design of an ICO giving free access only to 1 permissioned party. In fact, PoS guarantees centralization over time via an act called staking — your % control over platform increases guaranteed at <100% staking rate. This is how bad Eth developers are — they don’t understand incentives, permissionless entry, or decentralization. I mean you understand at 0 cost 1 party can have 72 mil eth forever with guaranteed growth of control over time with PoS? Central trusted permissioned premine of stake in proof of stake doesn’t raise concerns? Stake has value in both systems since people value the coins they have and thus have incentives based on future value of their coins. Coins are control.
PoW is the only redeeming quality of Eth now giving permissionless access to new coins independent parties. In fact it works in 2 ways. 1st is anyone can mine as alternative to purchasing coins while they can afford it. 2nd is anyone who wants to keep mining has to sell coins on the markets as costs ~ rewards in PoW due to difficulty adjustment to even cover their costs. Equipment aging out makes those costs even higher. This means that permissionless access is forced through both burning energy and through forcing selling to markets. This in turn makes miners DEPEND on coins value on markets to not go broke and hence connects control over miners to coin owners. Ethereum devs have been continuously reducing trustless emission of control by reducing PoW emission. Technically even proof of burn is infinitely more trustless than PoS as it simulates external energy by burning external coins.
EF’s main issue is not even stopping to consider themselves a centralization risk because (1) they trust themselves or (2) they want to control it. Third parties like us cannot tell the difference and we shouldn’t depend on any security that depends on a single trusted party turning down free money.
Attacks do not even have to come from the central party, they can come THROUGH central party by being forced to do something through litigation or force. The point shouldn’t be reading the minds of EF, the point is not calling something decentralized when the weakest link, that defines the security of a system always, is fully centralized. Only 1 party can have 70% of supply, not 2, 1. 1 trusted third party is not trust minimization, it’s the extreme exact opposite. You cannot depend on trust when claiming trust minimization.
Ethereum is the extreme exact opposite of trust minimized technology.
Promoting ethereum as its exact opposite is indistinguishable from fraud. An altcoin lead developer, fluffypony, accurately said that many eth-type communities are “scammers or scammers who don’t know they are scammers”. It does not matter to victims. You are risking people’s well being for profit. This is incredibly dangerous. This isn’t a game, this isn’t just some fun apps, this is people’s livelihoods. Treating ethereum community at all different from scammers gives them credibility and thus directly puts more people at risk for these scammer equivalent’s profit.
